Holyrood Abbey

The name

People

• 

  David I of Scotland

  Founded Holyrood in 1128 as a house for Augustinian Canons Regular brought from Merton Priory, establishing a monastery beside the Scottish royal court.

• J

  James IV

  Built a royal palace beside the cloister between 1498 and 1501, converting the abbey refectory into its Great Hall and providing a new refectory for the canons.

Cultural influences

• Augustinian canons and royal patronage

  Founded by David I for Augustinian canons, Holyrood developed beside the Scottish royal court; the growth of palace accommodation made the abbey a key setting for the union of monastic and royal life in medieval Edinburgh.

Connections

• P

  Palace of Holyroodhouse

  The palace grew beside the abbey cloister when James IV built new royal accommodation around 1498–1501. The relationship changed the site from a monastery with royal associations into a joined religious and courtly setting, with the abbey refectory converted into the palace Great Hall.

• 

  Merton Priory

  The first Augustinian community came from Merton Priory when David I founded Holyrood in 1128. That connection explains the abbey’s institutional origin and places its early religious life within the wider network of Augustinian houses that served medieval Scotland.

Discovery & excavation

What to look for

• Roofless nave

  The church has stood roofless since 1768, when an over-heavy stone-vault replacement defeated the decayed flying buttresses and collapsed in two stages.

• Royal setting

  The abbey's medieval guesthouse developed into the adjoining Palace of Holyroodhouse; James IV converted the refectory to the palace Great Hall in 1498–1501.

• Sanctuary markers

  Brass stones on the Royal Mile mark the boundary of the abbey's former five-mile sanctuary, where debtors and people accused of crimes could seek protection.

• How far the protection reaches

  The scheduled monument covers far more than the roofless church. It takes in the abbey precinct, Queen Mary's Bath, and the buried archaeology beneath the Palace of Holyroodhouse itself, the palace gardens, the forecourt, Mews Court and the grounds of Croft-an-Righ House. Excavation in the forecourt has found surfaces going back to the fifteenth century, with boundary walls and buildings south of the palace's south-west wing, and work in the Mews area has shown deposits and structures surviving beneath the standing buildings.

• What is actually standing

  Above ground, the church survives as the walls of the nave — built largely between 1195 and 1230 and later adapted as the Chapel Royal — together with the footings of the choir and transepts. Queen Mary's Bath, the small building at the palace gate, is a late medieval garden lodge or pavilion of the later sixteenth century. Croft-an-Righ is a sixteenth-century house traditionally associated with Regent Moray, and the buried remains around it are expected to include ancillary buildings demolished in the nineteenth century.

• What the scheduling leaves out

  The monument was last scheduled in 1994, but that documentation did not meet modern standards and the site was rescheduled on 7 February 2013. The designation deliberately excludes the above-ground fabric of every building on the site except the abbey ruins and Queen Mary's Bath, along with the top half-metre of the North Carriage Drive and Abbey Strand, all boundary walls, gates, railings, statues, sundials and fountains, and everything built after 1950. It does include the ha-ha along the south and east boundary of the palace gardens.